The Sea is a Salty One

Apparently I've picked up something else, something that keeps me sweating like a fool, feeling exhausted and feverish. Another doctor's visit, another round of drugs. One of the quite awful parts of moving overseas is being exposed to completely different cold virus and other medical maladies. Costa Rica has a few bug borne illness and other medical issues we generally don't get exposure to in the USA. But, I think that being raised in South Louisiana, in the heat and the bugs before air conditioning, has had a positive effect on me. Jim catches every single bug bite that turns into a hideous infection. I don't. I can only conclude it has to do with my childhood in a tropical clime. On the positive side I have managed to get a box of suppliments made from a Costa Rican herb that is currently being studied as an asthma aid. It works, it works well on me, even better than the CBD oil and medical marajuana ever did, which worked much better than any of the other tradi...

We're still schlepping around like death on a vacation. Jim still aches. My removed toenail bad had turned itno a dull roar now. We're both shambling around with colds that will not lift. It's all good. We have good deli food so I'm not exactly cooking. Lots and lots of naps happening. Quelle excitement. Since we're both still function on low speed we've both spent more time flopped down in the hammocks observing the local wildlife. We've seen the sloth that lives next door very very slowly climb to the bottom of its tree to pee twice lately. In the last four days a large flock of green parrots has made themselves at home in our honey mango trees. The noise of the birds is so pretty but deatening. We're talking several hundred parrots all squawking at the same time. After asking a Tico friend why the black furred howler monkeys have white balls I got quite the story out of him. Here it goes Onee upon a time howler monkeys were all white and very di...

Jim and I are ailing right now Not just my cut off toenail either. Jim's been having more and more pain all over his body, which worries me because in the past when he's aching in every joint it's been a parathyroid tumor. We've been through that three times now. He's down to a tiny nubbins of a parathyroid gland now. So off we went to the doctor everyone here gringo recommends - Dr. Raphael (not his real name but close enough) to get a calcium level on Jim's blood. That will tell if there is parathyroid problems. If so we'll be planning another trip to Tampa, Florida to the Norman Parathyroid Clinic. Dr. Norman is the only one that didn't make a butchery of the surgery and managed to remove the tumorous bits until the local surgery in our podunk hick town. The main complaint Jim had was that his tendon down the back of hia ankle is very sore and his back is bad again. Dr Raphy sent him off today to the private Catholic hospital in Liberia, about a...

Yesterday was a banner day for me. First I had to go to the doctor here and have a big toenail removed for infection. It went okay except I had a weird reaction to the local anesthetic used, and ended up having to sleep it off most of the afternoon and evening. I learned anew that I could never be an opiod addict. Kept making me get up and dry heave over the toilet over and over and over last night. No sleep yay! Minor surgery yay! Drug reactions yay! I would rather have the pain than the side effects of the narcotics they sent me home with. So it's grin and bear it time. In the middle of this I found myself having to block a pile of people I'd been friends with over twenty years. Old friends on Facebook. Why? Because of their support for what our government is doing to separate immigrant kids from their parents. One of them I was the most shocked at because she's been a foster mothere for as long as I'd known her. She was the one I would expect to have some compass...

I have a confession to make. In February of this year I started attending a local non denominational church with Jim. While I no longer drink the koolaide and have no belief is much of what's in most American churches I discovered that Jim is right about attending church for awhile after you move. You meet people. It's been great for that, and getting hooked up again with interesting volunteer opportunities. For years I was involved with with the food bank, soup kitchen and nutrition projects in our old town. I hooked up with those organizations back during my time at my first Quiverfull church, yet I kept up with volunteering through the time there, ending up at the mainstream church and later with no church. I've always found that helping others feels good and it feels like you're making some small difference in a world gone toxic. It's been mostly good, but that might be because I'm very minimally involved here. I like the pastor, I like his wife. I avoid...

Sometimes I get oh so tired of putting up posts for No Longer Quivering. I'm in one of those times now. Right now it seems the worst of the worst Quiverfull Evangelical bloggers are posting scads of posts justifying abusing women or, worst of all there are women (I'm looking at you, Lori Alexander!) ordering you to put up with any sort of domestic violence in the name of Jesus, saying you cannot ever divorce. I was thinking about this a great deal this afternoon in the pool, particularly after the last few weeks of watching the dragonfly that thinks our pool is his own personal babe magnet cum love shack. Oh yes, lately I've been treated to the violent spectacle that is dragonfly sex. A little reading told me that dragonfly males will find a body of water, or a special tree or other natural feature and 'claim' it with their constant presence. Our guy has certainly done that. He is constantly either sitting on the edge of the pool or buzzing around right above it...

This week was a good illustration in the differences between American tourists and American expats in Costa Rica. This happened at the fancy American-oriented grocery story near our. Tourist: "They ONLY have GARLIC bagels!?!" * slams down sleeve of bagels back into the store freezer* Me: *picking up same sleeve of bagels and starts  singing* "BAGELS! BAGELS! BAGELS!! I GOT BAGELS" Tourist: *rolls eyes before muttering to me* 'But they are GARLIC!! Where are the cinnamon raisin ones?" He says this in a voice that seems to indicate that garlic bagels are as evil as Hitler, Nsync and those idiots that thought up 'fun size' candy bars. Me: " I got some BAGELS!!!" *now starting to do a bagel dance with my happy bagel song. First time I'd seen a sleeve of bagels in a grocery store here and boy was I ever happy. I happen to like garlic bagels best. The only other place I've seen bagels in Costa Rica is a coffee shop that...

This time it wasn't me. Back when I had MRSA from the end of 2015 and much of 2016 I was the one trudging back and forth to the doctor and hospital getting my infected spots squeezed to get out the pus. Sometimes it was so painful I cried. But my infection was primarily in my hands and face, both areas with lots of sensitive nerve endings. Jim has been bitten by some big bug on the back of his thigh. A couple of days passed and it got red, swollen and painful. He lapsed into the weird man thing - the one where men start to claim they are having the WORST PAIN EVER and are DYING, while the women of the family look on unsympathetically and think "I squeezed three babies out during natural child birth" or "Fingernail surgically removed without pain meds and I didn't whine like that" Not trying to be unsympathetic. I knew it hurt him and could see the growing circle of swollen redness. Figured he needed to see a doctor before he developed whole leg cellulis ...

Yesterday the new guy started, the replacement for Helbert, painting the roof. It didn't go great. Jim went to church and left me here to oversee this guy. I'm working on taxes because for expats they aren't due until June 15th. So, it's always in my nature to delay as much as possible because I just do, don't know why I hate doing taxes but I'm more detail oriented than Jim. So here I am, surrounded by piles of paper, receipts, etc, tapping away on the keyboard, knocking out all the data entry. I noticed even before Jim left that Juan the painter was buzzing around, dragging his feet and acting like the last thing he wanted to do is to paint the roof. Yeah, I get it. I didn't want to do taxes either, plus no one is paying me to do it. But it has to be done, just like the roof needs to be painted. He even asked Jim to buy him breakfast. This must be a cultural thing because Helbert demanded lunch on those days he worked for us. But none of the other ...

If there was a big take away from my life this week it would have been 'always listen to your inner voice'. Real Estate Highjinks We put our house on the market two or three weeks ago at the price the realtor suggested, a good 70 thousand more than he stated it was worth a year ago. I completely ignored my inner sense that we should list it for a little lower and we ended up with 25 potential buyers with all of them saying to a tea that the house was 'too old fashioned' What the literal hell? It's a Cape Cod cottage style home that has been updated and completely remodeled last summer. It's never going to look right with all stainless steel appliances and modern style fixtures. We lowered the price to about ten thousand bucks more than we wanted or anticipated, and it sold in three days with multiple offers coming in. A bidding war happened and we ended up very close to that first price, within a few thousand. So my sense is that it was the right thing to ...

Our adult children visited for an all together too short 10 days. Beaches hit, drinks drunk and booty shaken. One of the funniest moments occurred at the local brew pub on the beach when I slipped away to the restroom after a couple of delicious Mojitos and I came back to a sight that made me laugh for days. Our 26 year old daughter was dancing wildly with tipsy abandon to the band playing "Play That Funky Music, White Boy" But that wasn't the part that made me laugh. It was the fact that my husband was dancing with her, shooting 'Help Me!!!' glances my way and gesturing to me to join them. No way! I'm a singer, not a dancer. We had friends visiting immediately after our children left so we stayed very busy. Towards the end of our Peacecorp buddy visiting we had an unexpected visitor - a bullfrog in the toilet of the master bath. He appeared late one night while I yelled for Jim to come see. He kept appearing, disappearing, reappearing and almost literally s...

My grown kids are here and we spent the day on Playa Avellanas. They tried surfing for the first time in many years and decided it was too much like work. It is. I have a saying about the ocean in general, and surfing especially - 'Sometimes the ocean is your bitch and sometimes you are the ocean's bitch' Today I was the ocean's bitch. I'd not been to swim at Avellanas before, I'd just driven past Lulu's bar and the beaches. Was completely unaware that about half the beach had  slippery rocks beneath the surface. I ran out onto the sand, stepped upon the rocks under the water and realized I had to be careful. I gingerly edged over the rocks, stepping right into a big rock hole twisting my ankle and sitting down abruptly. The tide flipped me over and I emerged five minutes later oozing blood from a multitude of tiny cuts and with a badly scraped elbow. The elbow is pretty agonizing, but not swollen up, scraped up bloody. I can bend and flex it, but the al...

I'm trying to knock out the last few things before my adult children arrive in the morning. In the last month I repainted the interior of the guesthouse on our finca a light turquoise with darker turquoise cabinets and shelves. The guesthouse has all new appliances. I've decorated with a beach theme and some furniture. Still not completely done, and will not be until the remainder of everything we own gets shipped here. But it will do for ten days. Stocked the fridge tonight with sodas, wine, beer and juices along with putting a variety of snacks, fruits and cereal in the cabinets. I don't want them to have to trudge that long path to the main house. The shipping has turned into a freaking nightmare. I've spent a lot of time in group IMs and phone calls trying to coordinate the packing and pickup of about 2/3s of our furniture and possessions, all the things we stored in the box room above our garage. We are selling our American house and settling here as residents. N...

One of the things that has made me laugh the hardest in the time without regular internet is the reaction of one Larry Solomon (not his name, but I do have his real name and location from the time he showed up and went nuts at NLQ) from Biblical Gender Roles to NLQ quoting his semi-treasonous rantings on his website. Larry's not on the Southern Poverty Law Center's hate list.... yet... but there is still plenty of time for that! I suggested that perhaps the FBI ought to add him to their watchlist, which considering some of his political pieces would not be a bad idea. Just like Vaughn Ohlman, a fundamentalist nutbar, bad author, girl-selling into common law marriage and theonomist,  Larry believes that our government needs to be overthrown so that his flavor of rare fundy-town, very fragile masculinity can take over the government and turn it Christian. Since this is in direct opposition to the U.S. Constitution. I would consider that at the least borderline treasonous. ...

Hooray! I finally have internet and cable - obscene number of channels - installed this very afternoon! We had to do the most White Upper Middle Class action ever. Storm into ICE (Eee-say) and ask for (gasp!) a supervisor. As of this morning it's been 41 days since we gave them our CR LLC papers, signed the contract and ordered the service. We were told it would be one to two weeks. Tico time. One of the nicer un-Tico time things happening is that the work crew is almost two weeks ahead on the construction of our monstrous huge pool.j Tiling starts tomorrow, and next week the pumps and water go in and a week from tomorrow we swim! I'm excited. Unhappily we had to go back to the U.S.A. to go to court to evict our renter, and pack up our remaining possessions to move everything here, right down to Jim's motorcycle. The renter tried to appeal the eviction order, but was shut down by the judge. She would have had to have coughed up all three months rent she's not paid...

I have been completely without the internet since we closed on the house, only able to access NLQ and email on the few days a week I've visited the restaurant at Witch's Rock. I have eaten my fill of Casadas and Nachos As Big As Your Ass as I've tried futilely to stay abreast of NLQ unsuccessfully. The closing went off without a hitch, even as Jim and I both were busy seriously mistrusting and disliking our realtor. I managed to keep from telling him off by the skin of my teeth. The day after the closing we moved into our new house, and I set forth on the Sisyphian task of cleaning our rental to exacting German standards. I scrubbed for five full days, we're talking taking apart every appliance that could be taken apart and hand scrubbing every surface. The realtor selling our German landlord's hotel/property/houses had already warned me that the Germans never gave back anyone's deposit, and I'd likely get nothing back. Taking the security deposit is com...

We close on the house tomorrow, just after lunch, and start schelpping our nine suitcases, 35 shipping boxes and piles of random stuff to the new place. It sounds like more than it is. On Sunday we got wind of a development we had not looked at in our price range and a huge farm in the hills around Lake Arenal, and took off for some sightseeing before deciding both places were simply too remote. Monday seemed like it was our new daily weekday routine, get up, get dressed, go to the bank, hurry up and wait, talk to the bank officer about more picky details and then head home. We both got home shortly after lunchtime, ate and took naps, getting up just in time to meet the realtors, both the liar and the less of a liar and someone that the Lying Liar was pushing as THE pool guy in Guanacaste. Liked the pool guy, and he had some great things to say about the property and installing a pool. What we were not prepared for was his estimate of around 40 thousand to install the pool. Jim...

Saturday morning took a weird turn. Jim poked me awake early even if I was staggering around under the effects of my asthma and allergy meds before coffee. He wanted me to immediately print out a copy of the engineering report and the architectural report from the home inspection team to hand over to lying realtor. Printed the reports out, threw on a beach dress while downing a cup of coffee and tried to make sure my feet were in the right sided flip flops. We went to see our lying realtor (my new name for him). I thought we were just dropping the copies off and then meeting with the sellers realtor who lies somewhat less at 4 pm. But no, no, no, we were having a full bore on meeting to discuss the reports. I'd only had a tiny bit of coffee, I'm fighting my stupid body's tendency to try and stop me from breathing, and I'm still dealing with a body hangover for having eaten the most delicious, but stomach affecting cheeseburger. Three days before I'd had a grille...

This week has been taken up yet again with the roiling cluster fuck of our house purchase. The bank here in Costa Rica has refused for almost three weeks now to release our funds to us. I'm scampered around like a crazed chipmunk hording for winter, but the only things I'm hording is a flood of paperwork proving that the money is honestly ours from honest endeavors. It's enough of a sum that's it has created massive stress levels in both of us. It's enough to buy enough CDs to support ourselves on the 8% return rate here in Costa Rica combined with enough to buy the house, the property and the guesthouse, buy some furniture, a washer and dryer and install a swimming pool. Yeah, 8% return, a crazy high return when you cannot even get 1% in America at that bank. The government bank here is backed and insured so the money is safe, well as safe as money can be overseas. Here's the scary bit about about of this and why is was more of a hassle for us than most fol...

I have glossed over the raw nerves and sheer anxiety dealing with getting a very large sum of cash wired from our broker to our Costa Rican bank account to go to closing on our new house next week. This week has been me on the edge of frayed nerves, trudging back and forth between banker, real estate agent, house inspector, lawyer, baker, candlestick maker. There's been some nerve related petty squabbling between Jim and I, at least that one evening when the agent told me (rather untruthful) that Jim had ignored getting things done, throwing me into a panic of trying to accomplish this pile of tasks. Jim showed me the email trail and Jim was right, the agent is a lying asshole whom I almost believed. Like I said, nerves on edge, providing more and more documents to the bank to justify bringing Scrooge McDuck's bounty into the country for a house and assorted investments. Just when you think things are resolved there is another document requested. I think we've finished ...